The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style

I have to admit, that when I heard about The Hollywood Standard I wondered how it measured up with other screenplay formatting books. I had always taken issue with some of those books for not being as thorough or as "standard" as they should be. Being a producer with several credits to my name, and a published author ("I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development From The Inside Out") but also as a teacher and film... Read Full Review

Our scriptwriting group uses this as a textbook. Excellent examples of formatting, style and how-to's. I'd also recommend for anyone interested in joining a production crew (shout-out to all those laid-off by the Big Three). Takes the mystery out of the industry by explaining WHY.

There are hundreds of screenwriting books on the shelves (some of them good), but even the best are 90% recycled material; endless prattling about character and plot points, as if the last 40 books never mentioned it. For all those hundreds of pages about narrative, there's very little technical information about how to convert that material into a rigid and admittedly unreadable format that is the screenplay. The advent... Read Full Review

I had not written a script of any kind since high school, nearly twenty years ago. I picked up this book and a copy of Final Draft, and wrote a screenplay that a former script editor referred to as the best script he had ever seen. While the program was very helpful in facilitating proper format, I could not have done it without the Hollywood Standard. Software will keep your margins in order, but it does not know how to... Read Full Review

Thousands of fine scripts never get read because their format is wrong: in Hollywood, first impressions and amateur productions can kill an otherwise-solid presentation. That's why would-be script writers can't afford to live without Christopher Riley's The Hollywood Standard: The Complete & Authoritative Guide To Script Format And Style. Riley ran the script processing department at Warner Brothers and was the studio's... Read Full Review